How about building more great high schools?

By Gregory McGinity

Jul 26, 2018 | 5:00 AM

Don't settle for scarcity (iStock)

Call it New York City’s version of Groundhog Day.

Instead of waiting for a tiny creature to pop out and determine when winter’s over, everyone waits for the results of the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) to decide who wins access to some of the country’s best public schools and who doesn’t.

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Unlike with Groundhog Day, the results of the SHSAT are invariably the same. Hundreds of students who are disproportionately white and Asian pass the test. These families played by the rules and defend the test as a fair arbiter of student potential, while others argue that the test is discriminatory.

Sometimes — like this year — someone, in this case Mayor de Blasio, proposes to upend the entire system by overhauling the admissions system. Cue the fireworks from parents who believe that their children will no longer have a fair chance at one of those coveted high school seats.

Here’s an idea to break New York City out of its rut. Stop warring over access to limited seats. Instead, commit to creating more excellent public schools, particularly more specialized high schools, and make sure they’re accessible to students of color and students from low-income families.

The annual debate over the SHSAT comes from the perspective of scarcity, as if it’s written somewhere — the Constitution, or maybe the Ten Commandments — that there can be only one Stuyvesant, one Bronx Science and only one Brooklyn Tech.

We fight over a few hundred spots instead of realizing that where there’s one great public school, there could be two. Imagine for a moment if next year an assistant principal and some teachers from Bronx Science were given the opportunity and resources to create a second school in its image. And maybe two years from now another group of teachers create a third.

If we duplicated every great school in the country, hundreds of thousands of students would have access to a dramatically better education.

Replicating excellence is already the model of high-performing public charter networks like KIPP New York and Success Academies. They start with a couple of schools, deliver excellent results, and then build more of them. The results are unprecedented, particularly for the students who are low-income and students of color.

The college-going rate of KIPP students is four times that of their peers in traditional district schools. If Success Academy were its own school district, it would rank No. 1 in the state.

This achievement is all the more significant, given that 73% of Success Academy’s testing students are economically disadvantaged. Proof that an excellent school could turn around the academic performance and college prospects of low-income students and students of color simply didn’t exist a generation ago. Now it does.

Public school districts like New York City operate many excellent schools. Unfortunately, they have no incentive to replicate those schools. Districts sometimes expand magnet programs, but too often these programs fail to serve the communities that need them most, as low-income areas tend to have fewer magnets per capita.

It is true that there are many practical challenges to replication. But there is also a cadre of talented public school educators dedicated to providing students with better educational opportunities. Rather than fighting over scarcity, it is time to start thinking about how we create an abundance of opportunity.

McGinity is former executive director of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which underwrote school reform efforts around the country.